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Articles for August 2014

Considering everything in Minecraft is made up of blocks, it can be daunting to build circular structures. Obviously, we can’t make perfect circles, but there’s a neat little trick you can use to make damn good imitations.

Let’s say we wanted to build a 20 by 20 circle in Minecraft. We can do this through trial and error, but that would be a long and painful task. Alternatively, we could calculate where we need to put the blocks using the Pythagorean theorem, but nobody wants to do that… The easier way would be to use Microsoft Paint! But how is Paint relevant to our problem? Well, when we draw circles in paint, they are really just a bunch of small squares placed in a way that they imitate a circle. By copying this pattern of squares in Minecraft, we can get convincing circles!

So let’s open Paint and zoom in as much as possible (you can do this by dragging the slider in the bottom right corner until it indicates 800%)

Next, you’ll want to select the ellipse shape and set the line thickness to 1 pixel.

Now, draw a circle with the desired dimensions (these can be seen in the bottom left corner).

You’ll notice that, with a zoom this strong, we can easily see each pixel that creates the circle. If we copy each of these pixels in Minecraft, we’ll obtain a good imitation of a circle!

So that’s my simple trick to make circles in Minecraft (or ellipses for that matter!).

I hope you’ve found this post useful and don’t forget to come back for more,